Every Little Teaspoon Counts: Cutting Sugar Made Obese Kids Healthier In Just 10 Days

There can be no more dancing around the fact that, for children, consuming added sugar contributes to a litany of chronic diseases, particularly obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, scientists concluded in new research published in October 2015.

In the study, researchers closely monitored 43 obese children and found that reducing the consumption of added sugar — even while maintaining the same number of calories, and the same amount of non-sugary junk food such as potato chips — led to a dramatic improvement in a cluster of health measures in just 10 days.

Just 10 days!

The kids lowered their cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar and lost a little weight, too, despite no change in their calorie intake or physical activity.

“The positive message is that you can very quickly reverse a bad picture [of health] in a very simple way,” by removing added sugars, said Jean-Marc Schwarz, a professor at Touro University California near San Francisco and senior author of the paper. “I have never seen results as striking or significant.”

The study bolsters the evidence that added sugar is a harmful ingredient that needs to be regulated more strictly, said lead author Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Benioff Children’s Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco.

Added sugar refers to natural sweeteners that are added to food to improve taste, extend shelf life or lower costs. The sweeteners are usually derived from sugar cane or beets, corn, sorghum, honey, maple syrup or agave. They are added to foods as varied as soups and salad dressing.

Added sugar does not include sugars found naturally in food, such as the fructose or fruit sugar found naturally in blueberries.

A study published in 2012 found that of the approximately 600,000 items in the U.S. food supply, 74 percent have added sugar. Americans consume 385 calories or 23 teaspoons of added sugar daily, on average, according to the American Heart Association. That’s nearly 40 pounds of added sugar per person annually.

Half of this sugar is in beverages such as sodas, energy drinks, fruit drinks and teas, according to data from the Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention. Nearly 20 percent comes from non-dessert foods eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The rest of the added sugar is in snacks and desserts.

In the new study, Schwarz and Lustig enrolled 43 African-American and Latino children who were obese and had at least one other chronic metabolic disorder, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. The researchers’ goal was to isolate the effect of added sugars on the children’s metabolism, keeping all other dietary inputs equal.

So, the researchers constructed a diet in which added sugar was replaced by another kind of carbohydrate. They removed or reduced foods such as pastries and breakfast cereals and replaced them with bagels, for example. The overall levels of fat, protein, carbohydrates and calories in their typical daily diet did not change; the kids still could eat chips and fatty foods. But the researchers reduced the kids’ consumption of added sugar from 28 percent to 10 percent of their total daily calories, in accordance with the World Health Organization’s recommendation.

Virtually every health measure improved significantly for these children within 10 days of switching to this diet, even though the kids continued to eat some junk food, Lustig said. Improvements included lower blood pressure, lower levels of fats and sugars in the blood stream, and improved liver and pancreas function.